Dr. Pauline Harries

Senior Lecturer

Pauline has been on the teaching staff at UCLan since 2004, where she began as an associate lecturer, becoming a full-time member of the teaching staff in 2010. Pauline is currently a course leader for the BA (Hons) English Language course. Pauline teaches modules in grammar, child language acquisition, history of English and contrastive linguistics at undergraduate level, and introduction to syntactic theory, and descriptive linguistics on the newly formed MA in Linguistics. She has worked with students on dissertations linked to Arabic grammar, Romance syntax, Pahari grammar, Old, Middle, Early Modern and Modern English grammar, language acquisition, dyslexia and grammatical impairment, and the teaching of grammar on the national curriculum.

Full Profile

Pauline completed an undergraduate degree in English Language and Literature at UCLan in 2003, an MA by Research degree in Linguistics also at UCLan in 2004. She has completed her PhD in 2014 at the University of Manchester.

Pauline's primary research focuses on change to grammatical systems over time, with particular emphasis on morphosyntactic change. Her approach is both descriptive/empirical and theoretical in nature. Pauline's expertise is in Germanic Syntax, with her most recent work centring on Old Norse and the Insular Scandinavian languages, Faroese and Icelandic, but she has also worked in Old and Middle English. Her PhD thesis is a synchronic and diachronic study of aspects of the noun phrase in Old Norse, Common Insular Scandinavian and Modern Faroese.

The work offers new insight into the micro steps involved in the process of morphosyntactic change. Directly related to this work, are her interests in (1) the relationship between e-grammars, I-grammars and the transmission of language from one generation to another (2) grammaticalisation/syntacticisation, and (3) the growth of new grammars. In Pauline's MA work on Subject Contact Clauses in the historical and dialectal varieties of English, and my current work on Old Norse, she also explore language at the syntax-discourse semantics interface. A further area of interest is dyslexia and grammatical impairment.